Moonraker: a tale of two worlds

Th-th-th-th-that's all folks!

Although Rob Ager disagrees, Moonraker is typically thought of as a weaker Bond flick. I think a lot of that has to do with the incongruous left turn into sci-fantasy and the slapstick sequences involving Jaws. If viewed as a Road Runner cartoon, however, these scenes are much more enjoyable, and the spaceshit offers some more great sets including a Mesoamerican style temple in Brazil (????) from which the rockets launch, and the space station itself, which is #cool.

More interestingly, though, this is the first of two Bonds in which the villain has  been proven right in the intervening decades. You can make the case for based Stromberg and his yearning to be a fish, but Hugo Drax is unequivocally in the right here, and his defeat is a tragedy for the future of Earth.

He did NOTHING wrong.

Drax wants to solve the overpopulation of the planet with a weaponised orchid that only kills humans, while breeding the best human specimens on his space station to take over. To understand the opposition to this plan, you would have to argue for a program of continuing to pollute and destroy the environment, perpetuating bad genes and the problems they cause, and allowing the Disney Star Wars movies to be made. Drax would have spared us all that, allowing for the rewilding of a great deal of our planet and ensuring an aesthetic legacy for the human race.

The laser tag sequence is retro future kino.

Moonraker therefore represents a crossroads in history at which everything went wrong, and it is thematically relevant therefore that this is the movie with the disappearing braces. Everyone who saw this movie growing up remembers the scene in which Jaws meets his diminutive girlfriend, in which they share a smile revealing that they both have metal teeth - in her case, braces.

The fact they push in for a tighter closeup on the second volley definitely feels like it is leading up to that reveal. I believe it, just because I want to.

Everyone, however, apparently remembers wrong, as she has no braces in extant copies of the film. Why would so many people have come up with an identical punchline to the scene if it never happened? Have we, in fact, entered a separate timeline in which the Berenstein Bears are the Berenstain Bears? Well probably not, but the fact we believe we have speaks to a cultural malaise that we all feel, a sense that the world of today isn't quite right in some way. That there's a better way out there in an alternative reality. A world where Drax won, everyone is healthy, beautiful and smart, and you can find a fucking parking space.